Preface
This book is intended to help those people who have learnt to program using the Fortran language, and who want to learn more of the tricks of the trade. A bewildering variety of books confront those who wish to learn the basic features of Fortran. Similarly, those who are using Fortran for mathematical purposes can choose from a number of books on numerical analysis. On the other hand, practical descriptions of commonly used techniques for non-mathematical applications are comparatively rare. Knowledge of such techniques tends to circulate as computer folk-lore in the absence of suitable books. This is the need which the present volume seeks to fill.

The aim of this book is to be practical rather than theoretical, to help the programmer with a problem rather than to codify knowledge. The specialist in computer science will no doubt miss the terminology and symbolism with which he is familiar, and the long bibliography of theoretical works. Such specialists must turn elsewhere for satisfaction, since this work is designed for those to whom mathematical formalisations are an obstacle rather than a help. It is a fact that these techniques are well known to the expert, and that much has been written about them. However, this knowledge is for the most part inaccessible to the non-specialist because of the mathematical notation in which it has been shrouded, and because the orientation of much of what has been written is towards theory rather than practical implementation.

Most of the chapters here require very little knowledge of mathematics. It is my experience that a considerable number of people are learning to program whose problems are not essentially mathematical ones. This does not mean that this book is only of use to non-mathematical programmers; rather, it describes some of the basic techniques which are useful to all programmers irrespective of their subject. It is true that some of.the techniques described here are more specialised in their application. In such cases I have given a briefer explanation, and leave the reader to work out the details for himself.

Fortran has been used in this book, not because it is the most elegant computer language, but because it is the most compatible and the most widely used. The version used here is American Standard Fortran, as defined by document X3.9-1966 of the American National Standards Institute (the language informally known as Fortran IV). The only conscious departure from this standard is that in DATA statements an unsubscripted array name is used to initialise all elements of that array.  Following common convention, the reading of cards is performed from unit 5, and writing on the lineprinter is done on unit 6. When a piece of Fortran coding occurs in the text, it is often interspersed with remarks rather than with Fortran comment lines. Many explanatory lines in capital letters, while necessary in an actual program, are less useful in a book than remarks in ordinary type. The term vector is used to refer to an array of one dimension. Computer storage units are here described as cells rather than words to avoid ambiguity.

I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for permitting me to use (on p. 82) an example from my article “FORTRAN as a language for linguists” published in The Computer in Literary Research.

This book grew out of a technical report of the Computer Centre, University College London, entitled Non-numerical techniques. It will be readily apparent to those who know the subject that my indebtedness extends to many people. I must acknowledge my personal debt to Mr S.  Ramani of Bombay, from whom I learnt my first Fortran techniques, and to three people at University College London, Professor Paul A.  Samet, Mr B. C. Brookes and Mr Alan Shaw, whose help, stimulation and encouragement have been invaluable.

A.C.D.
London
Bibliography

• Barron, D. W. (1968) Recursive Techniques in Programming (London).
• Boothroyd, J. (1963) Shellsort. Communications of the ACM, 6, 445.
• Day, A. C. (1970a) Full table quadratic searching for scatter storage.  Communications of the ACM, 13, 481-2.
• Day, A. C. (1970b) The use of symbol-state tables. The Computer Journal, 13, 332-9.
• Day, A. C. (1971) Fortran as a language for linguists. In The Computer in Literary and Linguistic Research (Cambridge) pp. 245-57.
• Foster, J. M. (1967) List Processing (London).
• Gries, D. (1971) Compiler Construction for Digital Computers (New York) pp. 216-24.
• Haddon, E. W. and Proll, L. G. (1971) An Algol line-syntax checker.  The Computer Journal, 14, 128-32.
• Knuth, D. E. (1968) The Art of Computer Programming, vol. 1 Fundamental Algorithms (Reading, Mass.).
• Maurer, W. D. (1968) An improved hash code for scatter storage.  Communications of the ACM, 11, 35-8.
• Moon, B. A. M. (1971) List-processing in plain Fortran. The Australian Computer Journal, 3, 117ff.
• Morris, J. (1969) Programming recursive functions in Fortran. Software Age, January, 38-42.
• Morris, R. (1968) Scatter Storage Techniques. Communications of the ACM, 11, 38-44.
• Radke, C. E. (1970) The use of quadratic residue research. Communications of the ACM, 13, 103-5.
• Shaw, C. J. and Trimble, T. N. (1963) Shuttle sort. Communications of the ACM, 6, 312.
• Shell, D. A. (1959) A high-speed sorting procedure. Communications of the ACM, 2, 30-2.

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